TL;DR
Anthropic is discussing a custom AI chip with Samsung, although the project is at an early stage and no design has been finalized.
Anthropic is in talks with Samsung Electronics to explore manufacturing a custom AI chip. The information was released on Thursday. The project is still in its early stages, and according to the report, Anthropic has yet to decide what the chip will be used for, how powerful it will be, or how it will fit into the server. The company may still abandon the effort altogether.
When reached for comment, Anthropic told TechCrunch that its diverse hardware stack, including chips from Google, Amazon and Nvidia, will continue to be central to its computing strategy, and said it had nothing further to add to Samsung’s discussions. Samsung already plays an important role in the AI chip supply chain as a key manufacturing partner for Nvidia. manufactures chips that powers workloads for AI training and inference. The two companies are jointly building an artificial intelligence chip factory in South Korea.
The talks follow a Reuters report in April Anthropic was exploring the idea of creating its own chips because Claude’s computing requirements exceeded the available supply. At the time, efforts were sketchy, with no dedicated team assembled and no commitment to a specific design. What has changed since April is that Anthropic has hired Clive Chan, who previously helped build OpenAI’s custom chip software, marking the company’s shift from exploration to active development.
The timing also coincides with a move by Anthropic’s main competitor. Last week, OpenAI unveiled its first custom chip, a result processor built by Broadcom.Intelligence Processor,” designed to reduce the company’s reliance on Nvidia hardware.Amazon and Google already offer their own custom silicon through their cloud platforms, and Anthropic currently operates Claude in all three chip families.
Anthropic’s annual revenue pace surpassed $30 billion earlier this year, more than tripling to nearly $9 billion by the end of 2025, making the economics of custom silicon increasingly attractive. The company in April signed a long-term deal with Google and Broadcom for about three and a half gigawatts of TPU computing starting in 2027, but designing its own chips would give it an extra level of control over the hardware that drives its models. Whether Samsung or another manufacturer will ultimately develop a chip for Anthropic remains an open question, but the direction of travel across the industry without full reliance on Nvidia is now certain.
